CALIFORNIA SOUL

Memoir from Keith Corbin, in the vein of chef memoirs by Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and Danny Trejo.

This is not a tidy, "how-I-made-it" in the kitchen from rags to riches memoir. With honesty and complexity, nuance and clarity, Corbin shares the details of his life that started in Watts, California, in the drug trade since birth. Readers deftly travel through all the worlds in which this one man has lived - gangs, drugs, prison politics, gentrification, and culinary prowess. Corbin tells the story of what it's like to grow up Black in America under some of the worst circumstances; to see unspeakable tragedy and commit acts of violence, to get locked up, and re-locked up, to attempt to go straight and find the system unforgiving, to find a culinary passion and go for it, to succeed and fail, and be forced to fight for your place at the table.

One way or another, Chef Keith Corbin has been cooking almost his entire life. Born in Watts in 1980, he grew up in the Projects, and by age thirteen, during the peak of America's lurid fascination with LA gang culture, Corbin learned to cook crack, becoming so skilled that he'd be flown across the country to cook for drug operations in other cities. Once his criminal enterprises caught up with him, Corbin spent ten years in some of California's most notorious maximum security prisons. It was here where things start to take a turn as he witnesses the resourcefulness of other inmates making kimchi out of leftover vegetables, and tamales from ground up Fritos. He developed his own culinary palate and ingenuity, creating "spreads" out of the normally unbearable commissary diet, and experimenting during his shifts in the prison kitchen.

After release, Corbin was hired as a kitchen manager at Locol, a heavily hyped restaurant by celebrity chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson meant to bring inexpensive, chef-quality meals and jobs into underserved neighborhoods. Suddenly thrust into the spotlight, and battling drug addiction and a seemingly unstoppable barrage of violent tragedies Corbin worked hard to overcome, he miraculously rose to become chef of Alta West Adams, seeing his vision of "California Soul Food" (a healthier, creative spin on soul food using local California produce and West African cooking techniques) become a reality as Alta gained national media recognition as one of the nation's best new restaurants.

Keith Corbin's Alta Adams restaurant has been named one of the best new restaurants in the country by Esquire, Thrillist, and the LA Times. A native of Watts, Corbin was formerly director of operations for Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson's Locol restaurant group, and worked for Patterson at his Michelin starred fine dining restaurant Coi in San Francisco.
The co-author on this book, Kevin Alexander, is the James Beard award winning author of BURN THE ICE: The American Culinary Revolution and its End (Penguin Press, 2019).